Consider the alternative where a bigger number of modded boards with dubious RAM gets into circulation, which is no problem for Chinese companies to do. It would quickly result in a distrust of all RPi products and everyone would suffer.

It also has nothing to do with going public, it is consistent with what they were always doing: it never was fully open, in fact quite the opposite and they were always protective about their HW, you can't even order the SoC as a separate chip, only as a part of premade/customized board.

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vanchor3 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This doesn't stop dubious RAM from going into circulation, it just prevents different RAM sizes than what it expects. A Chinese company could still swap in faulty RAM bought in bulk as long as it's the same size. This doesn't do anything to protect consumers or brand, just profit margins.

	▲	gambiting an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No, if you read the actual post by them they said swapping in parts of the same size won't work either because they program in several other hardware attributes that the board will check for when booting.